DRM-free experiment makes Louis CK a millionaire

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An update on Louis CK's no-DRM experiment in direct-selling a $5 comedy concert video: he's crossed the $1M mark and he's giving half the money to staff bonuses and charity: "One million dollars. That's a lot of money. Really too much money. I've never had a million dollars all of a sudden."

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That leaves me with 220k for myself. Some of that will pay my rent and will care for my childen. The rest I will do terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business. In any case, to me, 220k is enough out of a million.

I never viewed money as being “my money” I always saw it as “The money” It’s a resource. if it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.

CK Louis is a funny, smart guy. Never been a huge fan of his material compared to other comedians i admire, but has some great stuff. Putting that aside, i’m more than glad to see this experiment of his succeed. A lot of standup unfortunately gets pirated, but its never the comedians’ fault… just the arcane distribution methods. People can’t easy share their favorite standup, and turn to piracy to do so.

Hopefully this will pave the way for a better platform specific for standup and comedy in general. DRM free too ;)

Technically a millionaire in gross income earned, yes. But the show alone cost $250k, and then he spent another $250k on what I assume was bandwidth costs for the video downloads (that seems excessive…wonder what CDN he used), unless his web vendor ripped him off. So he’s more of a thousandaire. But $500k is nothing to sneeze at for 12 days’ work.

It seems like he has said tickets paid for the show, but then he has also said the show was paid for by downloads, so I am confused. And based on what he has said about writing and road testing, it’s probably more like 6 months work by a master craftsman. Still, pretty awesome. So….. let loose the torrents?

I think folks miss the point. Whatever his fees and costs were to to produce, manage and collect payments for this experiment he is tons ahead of the money he would have personally pocketed if he—let’s say—went with HBO or Comedy Central. He might only be getting a slice of a larger pie, but it’s a much larger slice with less “fat” from studio production costs.

Heh. i think Doctorow has a anecdote, where he shows that when he started giving away ebooks people was saying he could do so because he was “nobody”. But when that turned into a success, the arguments turned into “oh, but you have success because your well known”. Can’t have it both ways. Imo, success is any time you have a stable living doing something you like. The platinum records and multi-million salaried are outliers in the greater picture.

I love this, I really do. I’ve enjoyed Louis CK’s work in the past and this will get more people into it. I’m not surprised he’s made a million on it, I’m just surprised at how fast he got there. That means 200,000 people paid $5 for this video.

Maybe the next step in self distribution will be just selling the torrent file so that you don’t have to pay for as much bandwidth. It’s basically an honor system now anyway, and what Louis as really selling was warm fuzzies since the special could easily be had for free. (I bought the warm fuzzies myself.)

I guess when I said I wasn’t sure where I fit meant, not many people are going to admit to downloading it illegally, then paying for it. There just wont be a true number for that. Obviously I am not the only one, but likely a minority.
I do the same for music, download first, (maybe) pay later.